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Sandboxer vs Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a European platform-as-a-service that runs each app instance (a 'Scaler') in its own VM, with horizontal and vertical autoscaling and per-second billing across zones in Europe, Canada, Singapore and Sydney. It hosts production apps that listen on one HTTP port; Sandboxer gives agents a full root Ubuntu VM with memory pause, fork and any port as a URL. Pick Clever Cloud for hosting autoscaled web apps in Europe; pick Sandboxer for interactive agent workspaces.

Checked against Clever Cloud's public docs on October 28, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Clever Cloud compared
CapabilitySandboxerClever Cloud
IsolationmicroVM
Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel
full VM
Each Scaler is 'an individual and independent virtual machine hosting your application'
Full Linux with root
Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside
Preinstalled
partial
Docker runtime runs your image inside a VM; Docker socket can be mounted (breaks isolation); no Docker Compose
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory
Running processes come back
Fork a sandbox
Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh
HTTPS URL per port
Private with a token, or public
partial
One HTTP port (default 8080) is served on the app's domain; one TCP port (default 4040) for TCP
Longest sessionNo limit on paid plans
Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off
Apps run continuously as a hosting platform
BillingPer second, flat rate per size
Stopped sandboxes are free
per second
'All the resources deployed in this way are billed by the second'
GPUs
Self-host or open source
RegionsUS East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)Paris (several), Gravelines, Roubaix, London, Warsaw, Montreal, Singapore, Sydney
HDS zones for health data need a contract

= not documented publicly.

Where Clever Cloud is strong

  • Autoscaling both horizontally (up to 40 Scalers) and vertically, up to 16 vCPU / 32 GiB per Scaler.
  • Each instance runs in its own VM rather than a shared-kernel container.
  • Per-second billing and zones hosted in-house and with European providers, including health-data certified zones.
  • Deploys many language runtimes as well as Docker images.

Where Sandboxer differs

  • Clever Cloud hosts apps behind one HTTP port; Sandboxer exposes any port as an HTTPS URL.
  • Sandboxer gives root, systemd, Docker and nested KVM in an Ubuntu VM; Clever Cloud runs your app, with no Compose support.
  • Sandboxer can pause a sandbox with memory and fork it; Clever Cloud scales app instances instead.
  • Clever Cloud has many zones and autoscaling; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.

Pick Clever Cloud if

  • You are deploying a production web app or API that should autoscale in Europe.
  • You need health-data certified (HDS) hosting or a specific European zone.

Pick Sandboxer if

  • An agent needs a full Linux machine with root, Docker and any port as a URL.
  • You want to pause, resume and fork agent workspaces and pay nothing while stopped.
  • You want coding agents preinstalled and driven by a prompt API.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Clever Cloud is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Clever Cloud.

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